Children's Retrieval of Classroom Materials: A Test of Conjoint Retention.

Stader, Ellen D.; And Others

A total of 90 fifth- and sixth-grade students studied a map of the fictitious island while twice listening to a 1,100-word prose passage describing it. The description included 16 nouns that had been chosen as map features. Map features were identified by labels and icons. Afterwards, students were given a cued recall test with 16 feature-related and 16 nonfeature-related items. During testing for recall, students had access to one of four maps. Maps contained the island boundary alone, boundary and icons, boundary and labels, or boundary and icons and labels. Response certainty measures were obtained. After 6 weeks, testing was repeated. Results conformed with predictions derived from the conjoint retention hypothesis, a derivative of dual coding theory, in which semantic propositions are assumed to represent verbal and linguistic information, and images represent perceptual and spatial information. The hypothesis further assumes that the two types of code can provide retrieval cues across codes and that the map is stored as an intact unit that maintains spatial relations among features, thereby providing an economy of representation when the map is in working memory. Findings indicated that a real distribution of features significantly improves performance. Multiple representations provide an additional boost in performance. (RH)